Best Practices for Implementing Headless Commerce for B2B Businesses

Learn the benefits and challenges of headless commerce for B2B, and discover if this architecture is right for your business.

For a long time, wholesale B2B sales were completed manually—over the phone, via fax, or by email. But that is changing rapidly: By 2025, 80% of all B2B sales interactions will take place online. The typical B2B buyer is also changing. Millennials will soon make up 70% of B2B buyers, and they expect seamless, fast, and digitally robust buying experiences. 

Given this new reality, many B2B businesses are looking to modernize their ecommerce websites to stay competitive and grow their businesses. They are increasingly embracing new ecommerce architectures to give themselves the technological flexibility to provide more personalized, digitally rich buying experiences. Many are moving from full-stack commerce platforms to a headless commerce approach for their B2B operations. Our 2023 IDC survey of enterprise retailers found that:

• 29% were using a full-stack platform, but 91% were planning to go headless by moving to a full-stack back end and composable front end.
• 45% were using a full-stack back end and composable front end, but 74% of those companies were moving to a fully headless and modular approach.
• 27% of enterprise retailers were using fully headless and modular SaaS ecommerce platforms.

These statistics make one thing clear: Retailers are evolving and innovating their tech strategies at a rapid pace. If you’re a B2B retailer considering a headless approach for your ecommerce website, this article will help you understand both the benefits and drawbacks. We will also discuss other critical considerations to keep in mind to help you make the right choice.

What are the benefits of headless commerce for B2B?

Before we dive into the benefits of headless commerce, let’s provide a quick definition of headless architecture. An ecommerce website is considered headless when the front-end user interface is separated from the back-end databases and inventory systems, allowing developers to make changes to either end of the system without impacting the other. The most commonly cited benefits of adopting headless commerce for B2B include:

Extensive customization and full creative control 

With a headless architecture, the decoupled user interface is fully customizable. Multiple, personalized front ends can also be created for different channels and audiences. Developers can build your storefront using whatever technologies, tools, and frameworks work best for them. This allows you to deliver completely customized buying experiences for different audiences.

For B2B businesses with both DTC and B2B buyers, headless commerce can provide a tailored experience for each type of buyer. You can also implement unique functionalities for different audiences, and adjust the website content and buying experience to meet buyer preferences. 

Faster time to market and targeted scalability

With the front end and back end separated, developers can work on website features and improvements separately, and launch them independently. This allows them to accelerate the integration of new features and updates without worrying about impacting other parts of the website.

Developers can also use more modern frameworks, codebases, and other resources on the front end to improve performance. For B2B businesses that want to offer separate experiences or even fully separate front ends for different customer bases, a headless approach allows them to control it all from one unified back end, streamlining operations and workflows. Independent scaling of resources is also possible, allowing a more agile and flexible response to growth and increased demand.

Integrations with preferred tools and services 

When your ecommerce website uses a headless architecture, you gain the flexibility to integrate with your essential systems through APIs. These systems can include ERP (enterprise resource planning), CRM (customer relationship management), IMS (inventory management), WMS (warehouse management), and PIM (product information management). Let’s take a quick look at the functionality some of these integrations enable.

• ERP: An integration with your B2B ERP provides real-time synchronization of product data, ensuring accurate product availability across different front-end stores. It also allows you to automate order routing and fulfillment based on customer preferences, and provide customers a holistic view of their transactions.
• CRM: When a headless website is integrated with a CRM, customer data is centralized across every outlet, facilitating personalized interactions, tailored product recommendations, and targeted marketing campaigns. Your customer service representatives will also have access to comprehensive data to better assist customers.
• PIM: If you use a PIM, integrating with your headless ecommerce site will ensure your product data is consistent across different storefronts. It also allows you to provide more detailed and consistent product descriptions throughout your catalog. PIM integrations can also power personalized product recommendations.

Beyond those three key integrations, a headless approach allows B2B businesses to integrate with advanced third-party technologies like chatbots, voice assistants, and AI tools. This all adds up to a truly modern customer experience, no matter how many different types of customers you have.

What are the challenges of headless commerce for B2B?

It is true that adopting a headless approach can bring you greater agility and customization—but it also increases the chances that your website and tech stack will grow more complex and resource-intensive over time. Let’s look at the three big challenges a headless architecture can bring to B2B businesses.

Increased complexity 

If you aren’t careful in the planning and implementation of your headless architecture, it can “sprawl” over time as new features are added and systems are integrated. This means more work to document, manage, and update every part of the tech stack, and keep the front and back ends synchronized.

Each new feature added to your architecture will have to be managed and updated regularly. Each improvement also adds points of failure to your B2B website, requiring more time and resources to be dedicated to security, testing, documentation, and other tasks that simply “keep the lights on.” 

Ongoing need for dedicated technical resources

With headless commerce, B2B businesses can face a major undertaking when it comes to developer time and focus. If your business launches multiple front ends across different channels, each will require additional development time and ongoing support from skilled developers. As your tech stack grows more complex over time, your developers will spend more time maintaining and upgrading existing systems instead of innovating the buying process and customer experience.

Sprawling architecture can also place a greater demand on your underlying resources as your site gets more robust. To avoid performance issues, you’ll need to dedicate resources to ensure that your infrastructure scales alongside your needs for processing power and bandwidth. Platform providers like Shopify can help by dedicating their own resources to maintaining your store’s speed and performance without requiring you to deal with anything on the infrastructure level.

Reliance on APIs 

APIs are always a double-edged sword when it comes to B2B ecommerce site development. As we mentioned earlier, headless architectures use APIs to communicate between front- and back-end systems, as well other integrations. The downside is that any issues with an API’s stability and performance could impact your business. 

APIs also update and change over time, requiring developers to manage different versions and ensure backward compatibility, especially when dealing with multiple integrations. Additionally, as more API calls are made, there is more potential for performance issues. Ongoing optimization, caching, and load balancing at the infrastructure level are often needed to keep your site high-performing and delivering fast user experiences.

Though the challenges brought by headless commerce can be significant, the good news is that there are ways to get the benefits of a headless architecture without much cost or technical investment. There are many types of ecommerce architectures out there to choose from, and providers like Shopify continue to expand what is possible from full-platform solutions, modular approaches, and more. We’ll take a closer look at these options for B2B ecommerce to help you decide if headless is right for your business.

Should your B2B ecommerce business go headless?

Deciding whether or not your B2B ecommerce website should go headless is a choice that will impact every part of your business. Going headless will impact your website development process (link to new blog), add both upfront and ongoing costs, require a significant level of technical resources, and much more.

The first steps in making this choice are defining your business goals, understanding your customers, and clearly specifying any unique requirements you have. Map out the underlying problems you are trying to solve by going headless. Then, make sure you fully understand the architectural options available to you, and make the most strategic choice for your business.

Understand your options

Instead of wondering if you should or should not go headless, a better question might be: What ecommerce tech stack will work best for your business? The ecommerce architecture and platform landscape is continually evolving, and it is possible to build a fast, robust, flexible, and scalable website in a number of ways. Here is a brief look at a few of the many options Shopify supports for B2B businesses.

• Full-platform online store: While full-platform solutions have a history of being inflexible and limiting, modern platforms have come a long way. Many B2B businesses have done well building a store on Shopify using a predesigned, customizable theme. This allowed them to build a robust, high-performing B2B online presence and integrate with their existing systems through app blocks—all without writing a single line of code. 
• Online store with Liquid: To boost flexibility without adding complexity, developers can use Liquid, Shopify’s templating language, to build powerful, highly customized themes for a full-platform online store. This option allows B2B businesses to create themes that dynamically display product information, use conditional logic, and manipulate data. Businesses that want to deliver a very specific brand experience can build their own Shopify theme with a unique look and feel. The Liquid development language also works alongside HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and JSON.
• Headless storefront with Hydrogen and Oxygen: For an even more customizable approach, B2B sites can be built with Hydrogen, a React-based Remix framework, and hosted on Oxygen, Shopify’s built-in hosting platform for headless storefronts. Hydrogen is a component-oriented approach that also allows developers to use modern JavaScript libraries and tools, allowing B2B businesses to incorporate more advanced features and integrations without added complexity.
• Fully custom headless storefront with Shopify’s API: If you ultimately decide your business needs a fully custom front end, you can still communicate with a robust, unified Shopify back end via the Shopify API. This provides developers with high-performance access to all of Shopify’s commerce fundamentals and capabilities—such as contextual pricing, subscriptions, markets, and optimized checkout—while still allowing you to build a completely custom storefront.

As you can see from Shopify’s options, there are many approaches to achieving the benefits of a headless architecture. You can build a B2B ecommerce with a differentiated look and feel that is fast, scalable, and fully SEO-optimized, with much less technical complexity than would have been required in years past. 

Consider how a headless architecture will impact your business 

The choice to go headless can impact your business in many ways: from bottom-line revenue, to upfront and ongoing costs, to how fast you can bring new features to market. There are several important questions you should ask about your business if you’re considering a headless storefront:

• Do I have the technical resources required to build and maintain a headless storefront? 
• Am I ready to invest the upfront and ongoing costs involved?
• What will the development and engineering opportunity cost be as my architecture grows in complexity?
• How much time will it take to rebuild my site with a headless approach?
• Do I have to go headless to achieve my website and business goals?

It’s important that the decision to go headless is not made solely by technical teams. Core technology decisions like these can impact many parts of the business, so it’s important to understand the full ramifications of your choice and fully evaluate every option available to achieve your goals.

When headless can be a strategic choice

After reviewing your options, you may still find that a headless approach is right for your business. At Shopify, we find that businesses that are served best by a headless approach have some or all of the following requirements:

• Full implementation control: Some B2B merchants have multiple sales interfaces (e.g., website, app, kiosk), and a headless approach allows them to improve efficiency by separating out the business logic, content, and data.
• Preferences for specific code languages and tooling: It can be easier to find and retain talent when working with more broadly known languages and frameworks rather than a platform’s built-in coding language. Some B2B website developers may also want to use Github, CLI tools, and other resources to back up their work, and a custom headless approach will allow that. 
• Granular control down to the server level: With a headless approach, B2B merchants can control their entire ecommerce stack down to the server level. This allows them to integrate third-party services like headless CMS for content management and A/B testing tools for personalization, and to directly connect with other server-based systems. On occasion, businesses may want to use components of their custom-built headless stack for other internal applications, enabling a unified approach to infrastructure management.
• Truly unique functionality: Some retailers require very specific functionality as part of their brand experience or business model. For example, fashion retailer Denim Tears built a custom headless front end on the Shopify back end to achieve their goal of providing an immersive 3D experience for site users.. Other retailers may require detailed product merchandising logic, or custom routing structures. In these instances, a headless approach can be the right choice to meet very specific business requirements. 

If a headless approach still seems like the right choice based on your specific requirements and business needs, you can still get the benefits of building on an ecommerce platform that is lightning-fast, continually upgraded, and ready to support the most complex B2B models. Shopify offers a full suite of headless development tools to build best-in-class custom B2B experiences faster, and with lower costs. 

Whether you go headless or not, build your site on a platform built for B2B

The choice to go headless can be complex, and is not one to be made without careful thought and planning. But another choice that can impact your B2B business shouldn’t be as difficult: partnering with the right ecommerce platform.

Shopify gives retailers everything they need to successfully operate both wholesale and direct-to-consumer businesses on a single platform. Shopify’s continually upgraded suite of B2B features includes curated catalogs, custom pricing, personalized storefronts, flexible payment terms, and a self-serve portal.

Those features made Shopify the standout choice for B2B chemical and laboratory supplier Filtrous. Their website’s clunky interface and long development cycles were limiting their business and generating customer complaints. They ultimately decided to migrate to Shopify and launched a new storefront in just 63 days. Onboarding to Shopify was seamless: They could quickly configure features such as customer-specific catalogs, custom discounts, and payment options. Using Shopify’s suite of core B2B features, they automated more of their back-office operations, like the emailing and payment of invoices. 

“The constant updates to B2B on Shopify have left us pleasantly surprised. It seems like these releases are highly tailored to the needs of B2B merchants, and makes us feel like we’re being heard,” said Yin Fu, director of ecommerce at Filtrous.

No matter how you choose to innovate your B2B ecommerce website, Shopify can help you save costs, launch quickly, and continually evolve and optimize as your business grows.

Headless commerce for B2B FAQ

Is headless CMS good for ecommerce?

A headless CMS separates the front end from the back end, providing flexibility for updates in product content and design without impacting core functionality. This setup also supports personalized customer experiences across multiple channels, faster development cycles, and custom integrations with other systems.

What is headless commerce?

Headless commerce is an ecommerce model where the front end is separated from the back-end systems. This structure allows for flexible content delivery across platforms like websites, apps, kiosks, and mobile devices, helping retailers adapt to the changing ecommerce landscape more quickly.

What are the drawbacks of headless commerce?

Headless commerce can increase flexibility and scalability but also leads to technology sprawl and complexity. This can result in higher costs and additional overhead as developers handle dependencies and API integration challenges, potentially affecting performance and innovation time.

Is headless commerce worth it?

Headless commerce can be valuable for B2B businesses with specific needs like unique brand experiences or custom URL structures. However, for more straightforward B2B setups, the added complexity and cost may outweigh the benefits. Each business should evaluate its requirements carefully to determine if headless commerce is the best fit for its ecommerce strategy.